How to Run a Facebook Promotion – 5 Tips

While social media can be a great platform to run your promotion, it may not be quite as easy as it sounds on your first attempt. These are some important tips to consider that may be useful to you before you decide to use Facebook as the platform for your next promotion.

Have a Purpose
Social media has become a fairly common eMarketing tactic for businesses, but it’s easy to launch promotions without a proper strategy in place. It’s not a good approach to say, everyone seems to be using Facebook so we should start using it too. What a business should say is, we have a goal to achieve, and Facebook would be a great way to help us achieve it..
When running a promotion, there needs to be a purpose. Sure, customers may appreciate you giving away free stuff, but there should be some benefit to you in return. A common purpose for running a Facebook promotion is to increase page likes. This can be a great way to help build your social media community. Even better is to have a target for your goal, such as to increase page likes by 200, or whatever is an attainable goal for you...

Research Promotional Laws and Facebook Rules
If you put any research into running your promotion, you will quickly find that Facebook has some specific guidelines on what you can and cannot do. One of the biggest hurdles is not being able to require someone to like your page as a means of entry, unless you utilize a third party to run your promotion. You will need to use a third party online application (e.g., Short Stack or Wildfire). These applications are fairly user friendly and have an easy tool for designing promotions. The site makes it easy to sign up and offers subscriptions that are anywhere from free up to $300 per month, depending on the features you choose. You should read the full Facebook guidelines before starting your promotion, as this is not the only rule. For example, you cannot contact winners through Facebook..
Besides designing your promotion to follow Facebook guidelines, you also need to be compliant with any government laws around running promotions. Every country has its own laws and depending on where your customers live and who you plan to include in your promotion, you need to first decide if it’s even legal for you to do so. Detailed terms and conditions should be included in your promotion and available for all potential entrants to see. Check out this great article from the Social Media Examiner for some helpful suggestions on social media promotions and the law..

Promote Your Facebook Promotion Using Other Social Media (Including Email)
Coming up with a great idea and putting in the time to design a great promotion is one thing. Now you need to figure out how to encourage participation. If the purpose is to grow your online community, you need to bring in new fans. If you’re only promoting the contest through Facebook, you’re limiting your audience. Then again, if the purpose is to increase engagement, than maybe promoting the contest solely through Facebook is the road to follow..
Don’t count out your email database. For some companies, this could be your biggest list of customers/prospects and ultimately may be the biggest driver of activity on Facebook. In fact, the best approach may be to use your blog (if you have one) as a stepping stone for the Facebook contest or giveaway. Here, you get another brand touch and can direct users to the contest. We’ve experienced that using email to tell your customers may attain up to 28% growth of Facebook likes after a single email. Of course, this outcome may not be the same for every business or even every time a business runs a promotion. However, finding a way to make people aware of your promotion is essential to meeting your goals..

Know Your Audience and How They Use Facebook
Depending on how social media savvy you are, it may be easy to forget that some people don’t understand it as well. If you are emailing your customer list and directing readers to your blog, there should be step-by-step directions explaining how to enter.Remember, some of your customers may not have a Facebook account, so make sure that if these people want to set up an account and enter, they will understand how to do so. If the directions for your promotion aren’t clear, your customer support team may be inundated with questions about how to fill out a Facebook form. Now you’ve created unnecessary work for yourself and others..

Make Your Process Repeatable
Assuming your first Facebook giveaway was a success, it is likely that you will want to do it again. Even if your first promotion has a few kinks in the process, consider giving it one more try after you learn a few lessons yourself. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be. Write out your step-by-step process and take notes on what you learn. This way, when you want to repeat the process, you can save some time and avoid redoing unnecessary steps.

After running your own promotion, you will likely have some of your own lessons learned.